★★★★☆
Rarely have the words Le roi est mort, vive le roi been more vividly illustrated than in Jackie, when the former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, fresh from burying her assassinated husband, comes across the new president Lyndon Johnson and his wife in the hallway of the White House. Yes, LBJ and Lady Bird have not wasted a minute and are choosing new green fabric samples for the curtains.
Regime change was ever this brutal and even if the fabric sample story is not precisely true, the sudden loss of power is shocking. Yet for Jackie Kennedy, a mother of two poleaxed by grief — and played to perfection by Natalie Portman — the blow seemed crushing beyond human endurance after President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot as his motorcade drove through Dallas on November 22, 1963. Suddenly Jackie was nobody and her husband was history.
Pablo Larraín’s fascinating film covers the week after JFK’s death in detail from his widow’s point of view, and shows how, with a strange and steely will, Jackie sealed her husband’s legacy as a significant politician after less than three years in office.
The film is as grainy and colour-saturated as the news footage of the time and Larraín seamlessly merges the real with the fictional as well as the black-and-white 1962 CBS television special A Tour of the White House with Mrs John F Kennedy.
The story opens at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, days after the funeral as a pale and exhausted Jackie opens the door to an unnamed Life magazine journalist (Billy Crudup). She makes it resoundingly clear that she will be editing the interview; taking control of history. In reality, the journalist was the Kennedy-friendly Theodore H White and he kept the yellow notepad with Jackie’s annotations, on which Noah Oppenheim’s script is based.
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Cutting between the interview, the aftermath at the White House and the unfolding tragedy as Lee Harvey Oswald shot the president in his open-top car, the film unravels the behind-the-scenes machinations and allows Jackie to tell the story in her words. While Portman uses a girlish, nervous voice for the interiors tour, in the interview she is dignified and never quite breaks down, even when talking about cradling her husband on her lap: “His head was so beautiful. I’d tried to hold the top of his head down, maybe I could keep it in . . . I knew he was dead.”
That endlessly replayed horror is amplified by the colour, so different from black-and-white images of the time. Seeing the blood on Jackie’s neat pink suit, which she refuses to change, leaves you feeling guilty of gruesome voyeurism. Yet Jackie stands firm: “Let them see what they’ve done.”
Never has anyone seemed so alone as Jackie is on the plane after the shooting, surrounded by officials but untouchable in her shock and grief. Only the arrival of her brother-in-law Bobby Kennedy, played by Peter Sarsgaard, is some relief. Johnson is sworn in and already the wheels of government are moving on.
It’s worth remembering the fact, not mentioned here, that photographs from the amateur colour film taken by Abraham Zapruder of the assassination were published in Life magazine on November 29. Jackie knew that her husband’s legacy might be merely a crime scene — and, privately, a series of infidelities — and was determined to create an unforgettable funeral procession and to give an interview for the December 6 JFK memorial edition of Life. It was here that she seeded the myth of the golden age of Camelot in the White House.
Indeed, this film is all about glossy surfaces, the glossiest being Jackie herself, in exquisite couture. Larraín is brilliant at finding political tangents and using them to illuminate the whole, also seen in his Chilean movie No and his forthcoming biopic of the communist poet Pablo Neruda. Larraín takes an almost pornographic pleasure in the camera staring for minutes at a time at Portman. At one point, packing her clothes, drunk on vodka, Jackie gives us a full fashion show, including a red chiffon ballgown also shown in flashback with a swift, wordless appearance of the uncanny JFK lookalike Caspar Phillipson.
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However, this is Jackie’s movie and her plan was to stage a funeral to rival that other assassinated president, Lincoln. Yet for the world, the sight of Jackie in a black veil holding the hands of her children, John and Caroline, as her husband’s coffin left the White House, is as indelible as her grief. The re-creation is equally affecting.
15, 100min